Thursday, September 10, 2009

Math Concepts for kids and teens

A correct value system is the most important foundation (the goal to excel, the willingness to help)

How to make decisions ? (differentiate emotional decision and strategic decision)

How to do planning ?

How to do reasoning, analyzing and drawing conclusion ?

How to be open minded, humble but not blindly follow conventional wisdom ? (why human walk with 2 legs, why do we have supermarkets, how do we decide where to put a bus station, why an apple is more expensive than an orange)

How to be patient and control emotions ?

Develop a good sense of numbers and able to read different charts and graphs, observing relationship between variables and their trends.

I am not home schooling them. I teach them opportunistically, most of the time when driving them to school. We'll look at the street for things like why the road is black, why do we need the signal light, why we are driving on the right ... etc.

I usually teach my kids a totally new math concept (other than what they learn from school) about every 3 months. I also teach them on an as-needed basis when their school teacher doesn't explain the concepts well enough.

I also get them appreciate the power of Math as well as abstract thinking. Math model can help them to see through things and recognize that many different things (like species classification, company structure, family history, government structure ... etc) are all based on a "tree" concept. Once they understand the properties of a trees, everything looks familiar.

I mean just the knowledge is not that important. The important skills is to be able to notice differences and similarities among different things and be able to build a few models around them.

I haven't used any specific book but I also have another blog that talks about some good sites.